Bhumi B Patel
Livable Futures graduate student fellow 2022-2024
Dance, The Ohio State University
Biography
I am a queer, desi, home-seeker and science-fiction choreographer, movement artist, and writer. I direct Bay Area-based pateldanceworks creating performances as love letters to my ancestors. As a PhD candidate at Ohio State University, my dissertation focuses on queer, decoloniality in improvisation in the US. In everything I do I seek to create movement at the intersection of embodied research and generating new futures, using improvisational practice for voice and body as a pursuit for liberation. Making art is my way of tracing the deeply woven connections in which we live–past, present, future–as a way to build communities of nourishment and care.
pateldanceworks on instagram
Photo credit - Lydia Daniller
Q & A
What makes more livable futures for you?
For me the livability of futures is dependent on our collective capacity to create community, dream, and engage with rest. This space of imagination requires that we are all free, that we all have pathways to liberation. A livable future sees a free Palestine. A livable future embraces an end to violence in Sudan, Congo, Syria, and more. A livable future demands equitable protection and rights for BIPOC, queer people, trans people, survivors, women and non-binary people, and all who experience oppression. A livable future is an end to colonial violence and a horizon at which we continue to travel toward with all of our collective insistence on liberation.
What are you reading, viewing, listening to right now?
I love the podcasts "For the Wild," "Emergence Magazine," "Poetry Unbound," and "Inside Seaweed" right now. Because I'm working on my dissertation right now, my reading has been a little bit limited by my research, but when I'm not reading toward my diss, I've been slowly making my way through "Things You May Find Hidden in my Ear" by Mosab Abu Toha, "How Far the Light Reaches" by Sabrina Imbler, "A Year in Practice: Seasonal Rituals and Prompts to Awaken Cycles of Creative Expression" by Jacqueline Suskin, and "The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating" by Elizabeth Tova Bailey.
What practices are sustaining you?
As an artist, my improvisational artmaking is the primary thing that sustains me. By improvising and dreaming new worlds through movement and performance, I feel sustained in my work of creating that world I want to see right here in the immediate present. I find movement not only nourishing, but a grounding reminder to be here now. I find that being in community with others is another component of my sustaining practices. Whether that is over a cup of tea, a movement space, dinner, or simply sitting together in quiet shared time, I believe most in the world we want to see when I am in connection with others. I also find that walking, spending time with my senior dog, reading, and marveling at world sustain me.